How long before digital Unicorns like Ola, Swiggy, Pharmeasy, and many others realize the humongous opportunity of delivering health care at the doorstep?
Imagine an app like Ola, where instead of entering where you want to go, you enter the nature of your medical need/emergency and search and find a range of hospitals/doctors/paramedics who can act as the first responders and reach your home in an ambulance or a motorbike with an HCP as a pillion rider with all necessary equipment from the thermometer to defibrillator depending on the nature of the medical care needed and triage and route you/your loved ones to the nearest hospital with an indicative cost of treatment in partnership with health insurance companies?
Is Pharma’s business model like McDonald’s? Doing things over & over again without innovation?
McDonald’s is famous for its Hamburger University, a training facility at the McDonald’s Corporation global headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. It instructs high-potential restaurant managers in restaurant management.
More than 5,000 students attend Hamburger University each year and over 275,000 people have graduated with a degree in Hamburgerology.
Sound familiar? Pharma’s training has been on similar lines – hire people continuously and put them through the grind of mugging up essentials of drugs for diseases that the particular company sells.
While the McDonald’s model is ideal for its business of replication, it has outlived its utility in healthcare and drug companies are in danger of being reduced to mere suppliers of drugs to new digital platform businesses unless they learn to innovate.
With the Second Wave hitting India, customers (patients and physicians) will continue to socially distance themselves in the foreseeable future. Pharma must use the field force for reach and relationship and digital for frequency and personalised content for better customer experience.
The pandemic has made doctors adopt Telehealth in a substantial way to shore up their revenues and this will continue to be one of their channels to engage patients. Telehealth along with EMR/EHR, digital therapeutics and wearables is enabling doctors to better care for their patients. There are many ways in which pharma can support the digital evolution of doctors.